When our current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak entered the top job, I wrote about him being one of the most powerful people in the country whilst being a person of colour. I suspected it would be tough for him as he would have an extra layer of scrutiny that none of his predecessors would have experienced. As I said at the time, I appreciated that we had a period of stability after the s***show (there’s no other word for it) of the decade plus before that. However, I didn’t expect the PM to be playing race politics in defence of a party that never really wanted him in the first place.
Watching Black and Brown people within The Conservative Party has been wild in itself, with a lot of them propagating the very prejudices they claim are not to be evident in the country. From Suella to Kemi, their ignorance of the issues because they as individuals are tolerated by the party for now has been frightening to witness. However, to have the PM now be frequently used as the poster boy for the country’s apparent lack of racism is actually embarrassing.
The latest instance of this has been around the introduction of a new play called Slave Play that is coming to the West End.
The description on the official website is as follows:
At the MacGregor Plantation, the Old South is alive and well. The heat in the air, the cotton fields, and the power of the whip. Yet nothing is quite as it appears… or maybe it is.
The iconic, controversial, ground-breaking, and most Tony Nominated play of all time comes to London. Fisayo Akinade, James Cusati-Moyer, Kit Harington, Aaron Heffernan, Chalia La Tour, Annie McNamara, Irene Sofia Lucio and Olivia Washington star in Jeremy O.Harris’s extraordinary play about race, identity and sexuality in twenty-first century America.
The play has been receiving a lot of press not because of its subject matter – the description is quite scant so audiences don’t immediately know what to expect – but because they want to bring a practice known as blackout here to the UK. Blackout is when Black audiences are actively encouraged to come to screenings or performances where it’s likely to be an all-Black crowd.
The reason for blackouts is that it is often difficult to get audiences to the theatre primarily because of the cost of tickets. The other thing is that Black audiences as a collective experience their culture differently. As a community, we are quite expressive with the way we consume our art. We’re likely to engage in real-time with what’s happening on stage either by addressing it out loud or even physically, i.e. dancing in the aisles. That’s one of the things that actually makes experiencing theatre with Black audiences special. In this particular instance, the subject matter could be quite traumatic for us ancestrally, so we need a safe space to experience it. I’d assume that white audiences might even be more comfortable not having to look Black people in the eye during the interval to be fair.
A case in point for the way we interact in theatre is when This Morning and Bake Off presenter Alison Hammond had to issue a public apology for ‘making light’ of the fact that audiences were singing along during a performance of The Bodyguard in Manchester.
At the time, Alison had said she wouldn’t go and see the play if there was a requirement for her to be mute during the show, which offended the Great British public. However, I understood exactly what Alison meant. What’s deemed disruptive is actually an appreciation for the art, though I can understand how it can be distracting for the actors on stage. However,the policing of people enjoying themselves can also have the same effect. A clip recently went viral of international superstar, Adele, halting her show to chastise security who were harassing a concert goer for standing up during one of her shows in the US. Adele told security to ‘leave him alone please’ and reminded them and the audience that they came to have a good time and he should be allowed to in whatever way he deemed fit.
With an appreciation of how theatre is consumed differently, the producers of the play decided to have a limited number of Blackout nights during their four-month run to allow a variety of experiences for theatre goers which has been met with much resistance. This story first came to my attention after the writer Jeremy O Harris went on BBC Radio and addressed challenges that suggested this practice is divisive. This was then followed by a comment by the Prime Minister, also calling it “wrong and divisive”
This also follows a series of comments coming out of the PMr’s camp, including a headline on the front cover of The Times no less, which states “I’m proof that Britain isn’t racist”. Interestingly, Rishi has conveniently forgotten that he isn’t actually a publicly elected official and has no real idea of what the British public would do if they had had a choice on who to elect to lead the country. It’s almost counterintuitive to me that people are working so hard to prove that racism doesn’t exist – despite it being evident in data and socio-economic discrepancies that are rife throughout our infrastructure – why if it doesn’t exist?
Rishi is having to play a particularly volatile game at the moment with an election apparently due in the next few months and it’s clear that the Conservatives are keen to attack the idea of ‘woke’ politics to appease certain swathes of the public who are having their status quo disrupted. As much as you don’t necessarily have to have a particular set of skills to become an MP, I’d like to think that it’s a strategic drive to survive that helps them continue on this path that is so nonsensical. If I put it down to stupidity, then that screws all hope for all the other decisions they have to make.
The production team behind Slave Play are apparently giving serious consideration to whether they will be holding a Blackout night. I, for one, have just bought my ticket to go. I’m not a fan of stories that centre around the enslaved. However, it’s in part putting where my mouth is to support the production. It is not Rishi’s place to wade in on discussions – and manipulate it for voter gain – when there are so many more challenging and devastating things happening in the world. I’d also appreciate it if he stopped trying to totally dismiss the experiences of others for votes.
I suspect whether Rishi wins the next election or not his tenure in power is about to come to an end and he’ll be getting a very real reminder that he is and forever will be considered an outsider.
